Spectral Amplitude Purification in Distribution Matching for Diffusion Distillation

Zhenyu Zhou, Can Wang, Chun Chen, Zeyu Zheng, Defang Chen

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) enables high-quality diffusion sampling in only a few steps, but its optimization dynamics remain dominated by coarse, low-frequency signals, delaying the recovery of fine-grained details. We identify a pronounced concentration of spectral amplitudes at low frequencies in the DMD directional error, where dominant low-frequency components overwhelm weaker mid- and high-frequency signals. To address this issue, we propose Spectral Amplitude Purification for Distribution Matching Distillation (SAP-DMD), a plug-and-play approach that adaptively modulates the amplitude spectrum of the DMD directional field. By suppressing the dominant tail of the amplitude spectrum, SAP-DMD reduces low-frequency dominance and promotes more effective recovery of fine structures and textures. Experiments on PixArt-$α$, SD3, and SD3.5 demonstrate that SAP-DMD accelerates training convergence and improves generation quality under both 2-step and 4-step sampling.